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March 15, 2002

Tim O'Reilly responds to Michael Eisner's comments in the NY Times piece on digital media and copying from yesterday.

The software industry faces exactly the same conditions that the entertainment industry fears will destroy its markets. Software is digital, easily and perfectly copyable, and pirated copies are in fact available through a variety of illicit channels, but that hasn't kept companies like Microsoft from going on to become among the largest and most successful in the world. What's more, copy protection was widely explored by software companies in the 1980's, and what they learned was that consumers avoided copy-protected products.

(via BoingBoing)